The whole premise of my blog is that humanity could be heading in a sustainable direction, but we are screwing things up royally, and self-mutilating ourselves as fast as we can.
Class Warfare
Uh hum, so let's talk about class warfare, since we are seeing so much of it lately in Wisconsin, London, Greece, and the Middle East.
The dilemma is that capitalism is the only thing that truly motivates lazy, slob birds like me. Some people are far better at the capitalist game than others, and the wealth is pulled to the top, like sucking chocolate milk through a straw.
As the rich are enriched beyond all dreams, the "damn liberals," socialists, and other left-leaning weenies start worrying about the losers starving in the streets. We are told that based on Reaganomics, the wealth will trickle down to the poor bastards, likely in the form of breadcrumbs and hunks of chocolate stuck to foil wrappers. Then the Tea Partiers tell us that the government shouldn't be in the "hand out" business — that churches and good hearted people will take care of the poor. But so far, those good people don't seem to be giving little Johnny a warm lunch every day. Instead, we hear moaning about those lazy, deadbeats who need to get a damn job like the rest of us.
Now, granted, there is a flip side to this. See, I the Goose, am no liberal, conservative, or moderate, I'm just a dumb bird. But I've flown over enough neighborhoods to know that when you give people aid, a sense of entitlement DOES occur, and the more you give folks, the more dependent they become.
So, now that I've enraged everyone on both sides of the issue, let me say this: Communism and Socialism are failures because since there is no direct benefit, people are not motivated to give their best. Capitalism is a failure too, because it is all about Darwinism and survival of the fittest, and, well, the slow adopters are left behind (and ain't it funny that the same people who don't believe in evolution embrace it passionately as an economic model). Libertarians want the government to stay out of everything, which is simply handing over the car keys to the capitalists (right, they care about us we are told, as they ship our jobs overseas as fast as they can).
The bottom line is that NO current economic system is sustainable. Which means we all need our victory gardens, we need to barter, and we need to learn how to make our own basic necessities.
The End
The reason that Western civilization is failing is simple — we kept spending more than we made, on both a personal and government level. Everyone wanted a good time, and every politician wanted to get re-elected. Hell, in the U.S. we could have dragged this fantasy on a few more decades, until we were all dead and didn't have to worry about. Our children? Oh, send them to the finest private schools so that they can have some good survival skills. Leave them a wad of dough in your will. Croak feeling good about yourself, as your private nurse gives you another shot of morphine. Be proud of the fact that all you really did for your children was crap on them.
But I digress ... the other economic problem is that we stopped creating real wealth a long time ago. Our manufacturing base went overseas. We bought time for a while by whoring our land away, and then we played it out even further by artificially inflating the value of real estate. We gave houses to everyone we could, and after a while we ran out of GOOD creditworthy people to give a five bedroom house to, so then we started giving homes to the BAD uncreditworthy people. For a time, it worked, but then the entire scheme collapsed. But, no worries, Brother Bush bailed out everyone who was "too big to fail" (and "too big" to be responsible).
And let's not forget those two wars that put a drain on the U.S. treasury, and then the "stimulus" plan, that gave us new lingo to throw around like "shovel ready projects."
But what really got us is the fact that the recession meant a sharp drop in tax collections, and to raise taxes in a slow economy would only slow things further, or at least that's what the Republicans said. So, the point being, the collapse caught all the rabid policy makers and golden parachutists BEFORE they had the chance to go to Heaven. So, all these successful, middle aged capitalists are wandering around saying, "What the hell happened?" No one anticipated this, yet the path we've taken in the past three years has been totally predictable.
Big Circle
To add to the fun, energy and food prices are rising around the world, and our global population is continuing to explode, right on target. We have to encourage as many babies as possible because the world is infinite, and you never know when the next Einstein might appear. And it doesn't matter any way because the "good people" will soon be rescued by flaming chariots driven by white unicorns. Men wearing nothing but a diaper and some angel wings will be cracking whips and screaming, "Get on board, 'cause we are headin' for the clouds." Of course, this competes directly with Greyhound's new express service.
In the end, 90 percent of the population will remain in complete denial that the world economy crashed, and even as we eat rodents, rabbits, and neighbors, we'll be reading sacred passages written by Gov. Perry and singing 19th century gospel hymns.
And life will go on, just like it always has. But yet it won't.
Man really attains the state of complete humanity when he produces, without being forced by physical need to sell himself as a commodity. —Che
